An enduring peace is only possible through a genuine understanding of the past. To understand the Troubles is to set them in the context of the historical root causes of the conflict, in order to grapple with its pain and its horrors; to grieve and then, perhaps, to heal.

Where Grieving Begins is the memoir of Patrick Magee, the man who planted the 1984 Brighton bomb – an attempt by the Provisional IRA to kill the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and her cabinet. In an unflinching reckoning with the past, Magee recounts the influences and events of his life, reflecting on his motivations and the political context in which he acted; on armed struggle and the peace process. He chronicles the humbling and profound experience of meeting Jo Berry – whose father was one of five people killed in the Brighton Bombing – and the extraordinary work they have done together in the 20 years since.

A chasm of misunderstanding endures around the Troubles and the history of British rule in Ireland. This memoir is an attempt to build a bridge to a common understanding. It is written in the belief that much is possible, even in the face of profound differences, when there is a genuine commitment to honesty, inclusion and dialogue.

Patrick Magee was a committed member of the IRA for 27 years, fighting against British rule of Ireland under partition. He was responsible for planting the ‘Brighton Bomb’ in 1984. Since his release from prison after the Good Friday Agreement, he has worked towards building a common understanding of the past. He completed his PhD whilst in prison, and is the author of Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish Republicans in Troubles Fiction (Beyond the Pale Publications, 2001). He remains a republican.

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Buying link to follow shortly.

The daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst (who would become one of the most recognised names in the British women’s suffrage movement), Sylvia Pankhurst was raised in a socialist household and sought to lead a creative life. Through her striking portraits of women at work in the factories, as well as her designs for badges, banners, murals and even tea -sets, her artistic endeavours furthered the argument for universal equal rights.
Altogether, Pankhurst’s work created a visual culture for the modern women’s movement and her artistic output is only now being re-evaluated as a critical part of understanding British social history.
Katy Norris is an independent scholar and researcher and is an expert in Edwardian women artists. She is currently working as a postgraduate researcher in partnership with Tate and Bristol University on a collaborative Doctoral Award. Previously, she held the position of Curator at Pallant House Gallery, a leading museum of modern art in the UK. Katy read History of Art at the University of Warwick and the Courtauld Institute of Art and has curated exhibitions on various themes in Modern British art. Her publications include Sickert in Dieppe (2015) and Christopher Wood (2016).

The Modern Women Artists Series
The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art.

Tickets: £3 without the book, £10 with the book. Book tickets at Eventbrite.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

In partnership with Eiderdown Books
with Lottery funding from Arts Council England

Jamie Windust reads from and talks to Hedley Emmens about their book – In Their Shoes: navigating non-binary life.

Jamie is a multi-award-winning editor, writer, public speaker and model, specialising in discussing accessibility within the creative industries. They also regularly write for publications such as Gay Times, The Independent, Metro UK and others, discussing trans lived experiences and topical issues surrounding the LGBTQIA+ community.

Their modelling and consultancy work allows them to delve deeper into the fashion industry, and analyse the ways in which it can become more trans diverse, and create a broader landscape of LGBTQIA+ people within this sector. This has involved working with brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, GUCCI, Ugg, Dove, LUSH, ASOS and many others.

This is Jamie’s debut book, and at just 23 they are setting their sights high on ensuring that trans identities in this country, and across the world are listened to, cared for, and respected.

About the book:

“There is no one way to be non-binary, and that’s truthfully one of the best things about it. It’s an identity that is yours to shape.”

Combining light-hearted anecdotes with their own hard-won wisdom, Jamie Windust explores everything from fashion, dating, relationships and family, through to mental health, work and future key debates. From trying on clothes in secret to iconic looks, first dates to polyamorous liaisons, passports to pronouns, Jamie shows you how to navigate the world and your evolving identity in every type of situation.

Frank, funny, and brilliantly feisty, this must-read book is a call to arms for non-binary self-acceptance, self-appreciation and self-celebration.

Free event – book your tickets via Eventbrite here.

You can order the book from our webshop here.

Laura Knight (1877–1970) was an English Realist painter who documented life and culture in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century.
Educated at a time when studying life-drawing was the preserve of male artists, Knight railed against social restrictions of the day and established her own life studio. She was a consummate documentarist and her studies of the ballet as well as her government-commissioned depictions of women’s wartime labour during the First World War are some of the this artist’s most enduring works.
The first female artist to be elected a full Royal Academician, and with a career that spanned seven decades, Knight was one of the most important artists of her day. Today her work features in public collections across the UK and around the world, including Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the Imperial War Museums, London.

Alice Strickland is a curator for the National Trust in London and the South East. Her doctorate considered British women war artists of the Second World War and she has been awarded a Paul Mellon research grant for a publication on women war artists of the First World War. Her other publications include Learning from the Masters (2013) and Ethel Gabain, Evelyn Gibbs and Evelyn Dunbar: Three Approaches to Professional Art Practice in Interwar Britain (2008).

The Modern Women Artists Series
The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art.

Tickets: £3 without the book, £10 with the book. Book tickets at Eventbrite.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

In partnership with Eiderdown Books
with Lottery funding from Arts Council England

Marlow Moss (1889–1958) was a British Constructivist artist and a central figure in the development of European non-figurative art.
Moss’s importance to the history of modern art is arguably equal to that of her contemporary and friend Piet Mondrian, and yet her name has been relegated to obscurity. A pupil of Ferdinand Léger in Paris and one of the few women within the circle of influential artists in Paris in the late 1920s, Moss’s grid-like paintings, geometric sculptures and abstract reliefs sought to create a universal language of colour and form.
Today Moss’s work is beginning to be re-examined as a new generation of artists and art historians consider her contribution to modern art. Examples of this important artist’s work can be found in museums across Europe including at the Hague, and Tate, London.

Lucy Howarth completed her PhD thesis on Marlow Moss in 2008 and, after a period in the Tate Research Department, co-curated the Moss display, which toured from Tate St Ives, to Leeds Art Gallery, the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings and Tate Britain (2013 – 15). Lucy was consultant curator for the 2017 Moss exhibition at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich. She has taught in Fine Art and Art History departments at various universities, and currently runs a contemporary art project space in Margate.

The Modern Women Artists Series
The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art.

Tickets: £3 without the book, £10 with the book. Book tickets at Eventbrite.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

In partnership with Eiderdown Books
with Lottery funding from Arts Council England

From illness to major medical operations, child-bearing to pain and chronic illness to disability, feminist indie press anthology Disturbing the Body sets out to explore the many ways women feel powerless and at odds with their own bodies. In a dozen stories reflecting memoir, experience and body horror, this is an anthology full of heart that is not for the faint-hearted. Each piece is deeply personal, seeking the subversion of traditional memoir in search of the myriad truths about the physical self. Raw, powerful and often dreamlike in nature, these remarkable stories are unflinching as they reflect complex experiences of women’s bodies.

We have joined with Boudicca Press and fellow radical bookshops Lighthouse in Edinburgh (see their event) and Housmans in London (see their event) to put on a three-part launch to celebrate the publication of this original and relevant book. Each bookshop wil focus on a different theme – we will be talking about feminism and disability with Louise Kenward and Laura Elliott.

Louise Kenward is a writer, artist and psychologist. Louise left the NHS in 2013 and now runs and collaborates on freelance projects, often combining arts and health. She has an MA in Fine Art (2011) from London Metropolitan University and an MSc in Criminological Psychology (1997) from Birmingham University. She is currently writing her first book A Trail of Breadcrumbs. Laura Elliott is a twenty-something disabled writer and journalist. Her short fiction has been published by Strix Magazine, STORGY, and others, and she has an essay in Monstrous Regiment’s So Hormonal anthology. You can find her screaming into the void on Twitter at @TinyWriterLaura.

Free, register via Eventbrite.

The event will be live streamed on Zoom and the recording will be uploaded to our YouTube channel afterwards.

Eileen Agar was an artist who explored painting, photography, collage and sculpture. Her independent and inventive experiments with assemblage and colour linked her work inextricably with two major art movements of European twentieth century culture: Cubism and Surrealism.
Laura Smith introduces us to a spirited an lyrical artist who found inspiration in beach-finds, the natural world, mythology and classical ideas, and combined them into her own striking examples of modern art.

Laura Smith is Curator of Whitechapel Gallery where, among other exhibitions, she has worked on the first UK survey show of duo Elmgreen & Dragset (2018), a touring retrospective of Italian, Brazil-based artist Anna Maria Maiolino (2019), and with Helen Crammock, winner of the 2017-19 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Prior to joining the Whitechapel, Laura was Curator at Tate from 2012-18, where she was responsible for a series of international historic and contemporary projects, as well as group exhibitions including the touring exhibition Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings (2018) and the Turner Prize (2016).

The Modern Women Artists Series
The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art.

Tickets: £3 without the book, £10 with the book. Book tickets at Eventbrite.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

In partnership with Eiderdown Books
with Lottery funding from Arts Council England

Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) was an artist, illustrator and writer who was associated with the bohemian and avant-garde circles of the London and Parisian art scenes in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Hamnett’s career included designs for the Bloomsbury Group’s Omega Workshops; she was also an artist’s model for her friend Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and published her life-story in two autobiographies. But it was her sensitive and formal still life paintings, her striking, often acerbic drawings, and her perceptive portraits of poets, dancers and friends which defined her achievements as an artist.
Alicia Foster brings together works from public and private collections to foreground the accomplishments of a talented and ambitious woman who wasn’t afraid to do things differently. In this book, for the first time, Nina Hamnett is celebrated as an artist in her own right.

Dr Alicia Foster is an art historian, curator and novelist. She curated the first ever museum show of Jessica Dismorr’s work, which opened in autumn 2019 at Pallant House Gallery: Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries, and wrote the accompanying exhibition catalogue (Lund Humphries 2019). Previous publications include the monograph Gwen John (Tate, third edition, 2015) and the first complete survey of women artists in Tate collections – Tate Women Artists (Tate, 2004). Her novel Warpaint was published by Penguin/Figtree in 2013 and tells the story of four women artists who were employed by the British government in 1942–3 , making official war art and black propaganda. She is a regular contributor to Art UK and is currently working on her second novel.

The Modern Women Artists Series
The Modern Women Artists series of collectable books reveals an alternative history of art, telling the story of important female artists whose art might otherwise be overlooked, overshadowed or forgotten. Working across a range of disciplines and artistic styles in the first half of the twentieth century, all of the women included in this series were modern. Read together, these books begin to redress the untold history of modern art.

Tickets: £3 without the book, £10 with the book. Book tickets at Eventbrite.

This event will be BSL interpreted.

In partnership with Eiderdown Books
with Lottery funding from Arts Council England